If your work place embraces holiday festivities, take a look at how we transformed the place we work every day into a fun holiday retreat. For the last couple of weeks, Faithlife’s offices have been full of subtle (and not so subtle reminders) of what’s just around the corner.

Faithlife author groups give you the chance to interact directly with Bible scholars, pastors, and influential Christians—within your favorite books or in the group.

This is a chance to ask those burning questions you’ve always wanted to ask an author, but couldn’t. If you’re following the group, then within your book you can highlight the text and ask a question to the group—and get an answer from the author.

At the Faithlife office, December means Christmas decorating contests. This year, in addition to our usual inter-office decorating competition, employees teamed up to come up with the most creative gingerbread houses around. For those of you with annual decorating traditions of your own—take notes.

The separation of church and state does not directly appear in the Constitution of the United States. Rather, the phrase represents an understanding of the First Amendment, popularized (but not invented) by a correspondence between a Baptist church and President Thomas Jefferson.

A couple weeks ago, you couldn’t go on Facebook without seeing someone link to this plugin that calculated your most-used words. It runs through everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook to determine what words you say the most. The bigger the word appears on the “word cloud” and the more centrally it’s located, the more frequently that word shows up in the things you’ve posted.

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my brain around as a Christian is how a God who defines himself as love (1 John 4:8) and defines the greatest form of love as laying down your life for someone else (John 15:13) could lead Israel on a bloodbath in the Old Testament.

Elyse Fitzpatrick has been counseling women since 1989. She’s a retreat and conference speaker and the head of Women Helping Women Ministries. She has a certificate in biblical counseling from CCEEF in San Diego and an MA in biblical counseling from Trinity Theological Seminary.Read more…

Even pastors and their wives make mistakes in marriage. Not everyone can be vulnerable enough to admit their mistakes, but Matt and Lauren Chandler want to show you that every Christian couple has their own challenges to overcome—and as you’ll see in the video below, the mistakes they’ve made were rooted in some of their biggest problems as individuals.

The church in Corinth had a problem. One of their own was actively engaging in sexual sin that went beyond the immorality of non-Christian Corinthians (1 Corinthians 5:1). This person was choosing to live in sin, despite being part of the body of Christ. Paul goes on to say that the best thing for both the church and the individual was for the church to remove the man from their fellowship. Then in 1 Corinthians 5:5, Paul puts it another way: “deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh . . .”

To us modern day Christians, Paul’s instruction sounds like a cliche misrepresentation of Christianity you’d see in a horror movie. But that’s not how Christians in Corinth understood it.

If you don’t have your dream job right now, you obviously have to make some changes to get it. It’s probably not going to fall into your lap.

The process looks a little different for everyone, and that’s why Bob Pritchett’s new book, Start Next Now, shows you how other people transitioned to the jobs they always wanted. More than a book, the digital edition of Start Next Now gives you access to exclusive video interviews sharing how successful entrepreneurs got started, and the changes they made along the way.